A Horse with No Name

Monday morning was a slow day, we spent most of it blogging, doing laundry, and chatting with Dan before we were ready to leave. At about 2:00 we were ready to leave and said goodbye to Dan and thanked him for his flexibility with us! We drove to Indio, 50 miles south of Joshua Tree National Park, because it was the only town in all of California with a First Bank! That night we slept in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart, that is if you can call it sleeping. Most of the night Chris was awake due to the fact that we didn’t set up the Jeep for sleep, but it seemed that Lauren had been able to get a full nights rest regardless of that fact. In the morning we were finally able to cash the checks we had received from pear picking! Pay day at last! After the bank we drove directly to JTNP! If you are not aware, it is one of the best places in the country for bouldering! Needless to say, we were extremely excited! We entered the park from the south, and were surprised that we didn’t see a single Joshua tree, despite being the namesake of the park. Later we discovered that the southern part of the park is much drier and hotter than the higher elevations of the northern part, which is where the Joshua trees grow. We were first greeted in the park by a tarantula! Chris could see the tarantula immediately while it was crossing the road. Those spiders are huge! We took a short hike through a patch of Choilla cactus.

As we approached the center of the park, huge piles of granite several hundred feet high were left standing in the middle of the desert. Large boulders and Joshua trees were strewn all around the bases of the granite towers. This part of the park is where the bouldering is at its best! Knowing that we would be wasting our time trying to discover the problems on our own, we drove to the nearest town to find an outfitter. We rented a book for two days at a cost of $6. It was a great bargain considering that the cost of buying the guidebook would have been $37.50! As soon as we had our book we drove back into the park to do some climbing! The first place we tried was called Turtle Rock. We were quickly reminded that climbing in a gym does nothing to prepare you for the challenges of outdoor bouldering! The rock was sharp and didn’t take long to leave your hands raw and ripped up. As we made our way around Turtle Rock we discovered a cluster of boulders called So High. They better met our skill level, and ended up being a good place for us to climb because of the increased chance of completing the problems we started. Joshua Tree climbing also requires that you climb regularly over 20’ to top out a problem so a fall from that height even with a crash pad could be quite painful! Chris topped out several tall problems on a wedge shaped boulder called the wedge, and several other boulders nearby, before jokingly attempting a difficult problem. To his surprise the problem was doable for someone of his height and he completed it after about a half hour.

 After that we drove across the street to a boulder that we thought would be good to end on. It wasn’t at all! It was a lot of friction climbing which meant that you were bear hugging a rock with no handholds or foot holds. Lauren completed a couple of the problems before trying a neat crack problem on the same rock.  She completed it successfully! We both continued to climb as the sun began to sink in the sky. The sunset that night was phenomenal! Once the sun had set we drove out of the park and slept on some BLM land about 15 miles outside the park entrance. 

In the morning we drove to a cluster of boulders called Planet X. Chris climbed a pretty cool vertical crack to top out the 20’ rock, but had neglected to find a way down before he went up! Once at the top he was faced with what looked to be a super sketchy rappel point down the inverted portion of the rock or a jump onto a neighboring rock. After several minutes of pondering and the testing of the ropes security by Lauren down below, he opted to make the jump and made his way down safely! Whew!

 From there we headed to a boulder known as Dragon Scales, which Lauren had picked out. It looked much like you would expect it to, with lots of shallow cracks crisscrossing along its face to form what looked like scales. She completed the rock on her first attempt and topped out 23’ above the sandy floor! It was a super hot day, and we had been climbing for over two hours by the time we finished at Dragon Scale so we headed back to the car to eat and get some water. 

We planned to take a break from bouldering by hiking to Barkers Dam and driving to an overlook of the San Andreas Fault line. We did the overlook first, took pictures and began driving to the trailhead. The Barker Dam was very interesting because it explained many of the adaptations that the desert plants had that allowed them to survive in the Mojave Desert. Cattle ranchers, to contain rainwater, built the dam back at the beginning of the century. Soon after the dam was complete the climate became drier and all the grasses in the area died forcing the ranchers to move on. There was a little bit of water in the dam but not much since the park had not received rain in several years! 

When we got back to the car we picked one more boulder to climb based on the recommendations of the outfitter we rented the guidebook from. It was called Pinhead! This was Laurens favorite climb by far! The first problem she did took some perseverance on her part, as she had to try several maneuvers before finally climbing over the bulge. The second problem she tried was a difficult route up one side fairly smoothly before reaching the top and hauling herself over it extremely awkwardly. It was pretty funny to watch! Chris did the same problem with only a slightly less awkward top out, before he attempted a crack climb to the top of the 16’ boulder. Although completed successfully he definitely would not win any style points! Both of us had a ton of fun bouldering in Joshua tree, but we could use some work on our gracefulness!

 After Pinhead, we used the remaining evening light to get a start on the trek to Grand Canyon. It was a long night of driving, covering over 250 miles, to get from Southern California, to Northern Arizona. As we drove through Arizona we noticed a lot of great Arizona state signs, but we decided it would be better to take the pictures in the day when we would leave to go to Utah. We arrived in Williams at about 1:00 in the morning and passed out in a parking lot next to Safeway. After shopping for some groceries in the morning we drove a portion of Historic Route 66 as it passed out of Williams and on towards the Grand Canyon! 

We arrived at the Grand Canyon before noon, and made lunch in the Visitor Center Parking lot. The Rangers at the Visitor Center highlighted some hikes we could do while we were there for two days and from there we set out on the Rim Trail! The views were awesome, but because we did not have the time or resources to make a journey into the inner canyon, the Grand Canyon felt a little bit like a let down. We spent several hours walking the Rim Trail and reading about the origins of the rock found striated along the canyon walls. To most people that probably sounds boring, but for some reason both of us love geology and learning about what type of rocks were found in the canyon and how the geologic forces acted on them to put them there was fascinating! We also liked to pick out which rock would make the best countertop! 

When we realized that we did not have enough time to walk the whole trail that day we got on one of the free shuttles and took it to several of the lookout points. We watched the sunset over the canyon and caught several glimpses of the Colorado River a mile below us. The Grand Canyon is so massive, that the Colorado River looked like a stream far below us, but it is on average 300 feet wide throughout the 270-mile long canyon! The immenseness of the Canyon was overwhelming, it is certainly one of the parks we want to revisit with more time so that we can make a trip to the canyon floor or raft the length of the National Park on the Colorado River! The second day we were there we saw more lookouts and the Desert Rim Watchtower, which was built to commemorate and honor many types of the Puebloan Architecture found in the desert Southwest. It was thoughtfully designed to blend into the canyon rim and decorated by ancestors of the Hopi Indians. After we toured the watchtower we returned to the Jeep and began our drive into Utah, and Zion Canyon National Park! 

Once at the state line we found an amazing sign welcoming us to Utah, but on the other sign of the highway was only a tiny green sign that had written Arizona state line. After seeing all of those awesome signs this was such a let down and we immediately regretted not taking the picture two nights before.